The World That We Knew by Alice Hoffman
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Release Date: September 24, 2019
Length: 384 pages
Amazon

{A Bit of Backstory}

Single Sentence Summary

An intricate story of people not only trying to survive WWII, but also put up resistance in the French countryside, all with a touch of Alice Hoffman’s signature magic….

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Akin by Emma Donoghue
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Release Date: September 10, 2019
Length: 352 pages
Amazon

{A Bit of Backstory}

Single Sentence Summary

A 79-year old man and the 11-year old great nephew he’s just agreed to temporarily care for travel to Nice, trying to understand the past and each other along their journey….

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City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert
Narrator: Blair Brown
Publisher: Riverhead Books (Penguin Audio)
Release Date: June 4, 2019
Length: 480 pages (15 hrs. 8 min.)
Amazon

{A Bit of Backstory}

Single Sentence Summary

A woman who arrived in New York as an innocent 19-year old and left in shame less than a year later looks back on her life with the perspective of nearly 90 years….

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Eagle & Crane by Suzanne Rindell
Publisher: G.P. Putnam’s Sons
Release Date: July 3, 2018
Length: 448 pages
Amazon

{A Bit of Backstory}

Single Sentence Summary

Rivals Louis Thorn and Harry Yamada make up the daredevil flying act, Eagle & Crane, until life grounds them and Harry is sent to a Japanese internment camp, leaving Louis behind to piece together how Harry’s body came to be found in a crashed plane….

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In this week’s challenge readers were asked to be “experts” in one of three ways: share 3 or more books on a single topic that you have read and can recommend (be the expert), put the call out for good nonfiction on a specific topic that you have been dying to read (ask the expert), or you can create your own list of books on a topic that you’d like to read (become the expert). I decided to combine my new review of Code Girls with “becoming an expert” on women and their roles during World War II. WWII has long been a favorite topic of mine in novels, so the jump into nonfiction was a natural. Code Girls piqued my interest on both code breaking and other roles women played in WWII.

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The theme of this week’s Top Ten Tuesday, hosted by The Broke and the Bookish, is books that you wish had more or less of something. That wasn’t quite working for me and I’d been wanting to do a post highlighting tear-jerkers. So, I played with the theme a little to make it work. Other than the times I was pregnant, I’m not the type to cry over a Hallmark commercial or a sad luck story posted on Facebook. But, when reading a great book, I can get very involved in the characters’ lives. Sometimes that results in a flood of tears. These ten novels did just that to me and I bet they have to many of you, too!

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara is one of my all-time favorite books. The themes were difficult, making this book not easy to read, but I still found it magnificent. Stories of life-long friendships always appeal to me. This book about four college classmates all devoted to their terribly flawed classmate, Jude, was no exception. There were several times when reading A Little Life that I had to take a break from it. My sadness was so overwhelming that I literally could not keep reading through my tears. I loved it!…

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